Villette Read Free Page B

Lucy’s role as narrator/spectator, the ambiguous figure in the room with no established place or remarkable qualities, contrasts sharply with the theatrical presence of the young Polly, who demands constant attention. Unlike the opening of Jane Eyre, when Jane is forced to endure the cruelty of her ruthless relatives, Lucy is an accepted figure in the Bretton household. Lucy’s motivations and passions are less clearly defined than Jane’s enraged outbursts and steely silences. We hear very little about how Lucy feels in this domestic situation where she is both wanted and ignored. She becomes a kind of mothering figure for Polly, whose own mother, “a very pretty, but a giddy, careless woman” (p. 9), had abandoned her. Polly is dealing with her father’s absence and her newfound love, Mrs. Bretton’s son Graham.
    Lucy watches as Polly transfers her attachment from her father to an obsession with the young Bretton:
    With curious readiness did she adapt herself to such themes as interested him. One would have thought the child had no mind or life of her own, but must necessarily live, move, and have her being in another: now that her father was taken from her, she nestled to Graham, and seemed to feel by his feelings: to exist in his existence. She learned the names of all his schoolfellows in a trice; she got by heart their characters as given from his lips: a single description of an individual seemed to suffice. She never forgot or confused identities: she would talk with him the whole evening about people she had never seen, and appear completely to realize their aspect, manners, and dispositions (pp. 28-29).
    Brontë seems to be juxtaposing Polly’s visible development with Lucy’s invisible adolescence. Throughout these early chapters she hints that there is something haunting and perverse about Polly’s unquestioning faith in the passive, debilitating sacrifices of being female. Polly is described as an object, “a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax” (p. 11), and as a spirit, “a small ghost gliding over the carpet” (p. 38), and as “some precocious fanatic or untimely saint” (p. 15). Polly’s function as a doll, a picture, and a wax figure suggests that she is a fixed and static representation of femininity. Her saintly, ghost-like qualities are manifestations of her manic, almost religious dedication to the process of becoming a woman. When she sits embroidering with her needle, a “perverse weapon,” she remains “silent, diligent, absorbed, womanly” (p. 19). Polly’s devotion to Graham, which involves memorization, mimicry, undivided focus, and a complete immersion of her identity with his, is a kind of primer for the expectations of a good wife. Polly is in the process of materializing—the reader has the sense of who she will become even at six years old—but, we seem to be led to ask, what will become of Lucy?
    Polly’s attentions delight Graham, who admits to his mother, “she amuses me a great deal more than you or Lucy Snowe” (p. 31). When he neglects her and she turns to Lucy for comfort, Lucy worries about Polly’s ability to bear such disappointments: “How will she get through this world, or battle with this life? How will she bear the shocks and repulses, the humiliations and desolations, which books, and my own reason tell me are prepared for all flesh?” (p. 38). This is the question that will also haunt Lucy, but in comparison to Polly it seems clear that Lucy will have a different fate because of the invisibility she so closely covets and safeguards. No one seems to notice her, but she also appears not to care.
    The early section of the novel sets up a series of images and scenes for the reader, a framework of clues that will be crucially important to understanding events later in the narrative. Polly and Graham will reappear in adult guises, but their childhood selves will be present in their interactions and desires. Because we know so little about Lucy’s